MONTREAL

Years ago, I had the pleasure of a weekend in Canada with 3 of my best buddies: Jim, Mike and Joe. All of us are still very close, and Mike married my sister, so he’s family whether he wants to be or not! All of these guys have stood with me through thick and thin, highs and lows, funny and not so much. If any of them are reading this, they already know the story that I’m about to tell you, and I welcome their comments if they remember it a little differently. With us, funny and not so much actually take place concurrently much of the time. As we all hurl through life, we are often faced with LAUGH or CRY situations. A vast majority of the time, perhaps because my peer group agrees with me that almost no one’s fate is written beforehand, we choose LAUGH. What follows is an evening tale of baseball in Canada.

Summer of 2002, and 3 out of the four of us love baseball, have some money, and are single. The other one has a young son, but can’t ever be on the bench when a good time is to be had, so we talk ourselves into renting a van and driving 5 hours north from New Hampshire to go and see baseball in Montreal. We had already been to this beautiful city about 5 years prior for a bachelor party of another good friend, but THAT story will not be written. At least not on a free blog site haha. We knew that the Montreal Expos (National League baseball club) was dying. The stadium was a leftover, spaceship-like, roofed in structure from the 1976 Olympic Games, and the surrounding structures were ugly, made of gray concrete, and looked very 1970’s blocky, trying to be futuristic society symbols of human progress. Swing and a miss. It was terrible. Looked cold, felt cold, and even on a warm summer night, it wasn’t an inviting place to watch a ballgame. Rumor had it that the Expos were eventually going to relocate (they did in 2005, and now they are the Washington Nationals), so we wanted to catch a game up there before the team folded. In addition, watching live baseball in Boston is ridiculously expensive, so we thought we might be able to get good seats at Olympic Stadium in Montreal. So the plan was, leave early, drive north, check in at the hotel, go to the stadium and buy tickets for that evening’s game against the New York Mets. One can’t buy game of tickets in Boston without taking a second mortgage on the house, but we knew that Montreal was this big barn, with hard, bright yellow and blue plastic seats, so we figured we would get in no problem.

At the ticket window, we asked how close we could sit behind home plate. “How close would you like to sit?” The woman asked. Thinking she was kidding, I said “As close as we can get. We’re from Boston and it’s impossible to sit behind the plate at Fenway Pahhk for less that a grand.” Four seats at something like $16 a piece (Canadian currency mind you) and we were about 8 rows behind home plate. In fact, I sat next to a man working for the Mets who was running the radar gun to clock pitch speed. It was so amazing that when we yipped and yelled, the home plate umpire could actually take our advice about the strike zone, or his less than 20/20 vision. He even turned and looked at us once. It was great fun, until around the 4th inning.

To get to other seats, I could have stayed in my manual wheelchair, but that would have meant being further back in the stands. My friends quickly agreed to piggy back me down to the seats we bought and have the section usher keep an eye on my chair during the game. No, the chair didn’t get stolen or damaged. Why would you think that? You people reading this are as twisted as I am. Must be why we get along. SO, here I sit, when I realize that I’m not going to make it through this game without going to the Olympic Stadium men’s room. Preferably the nearest one. Quickly. I let Jim know and he moved fast, up the stands I went, a grown man on his back like Yoda training Luke to be a Jedi. People looked at us, but there were only a few thousand people in the whole stadium and I’ve gotten used to looking right back, smiling and winking. No one knows what to do with that, so they usually just look away. Not to be outdone, Mike and Joe call out that we should “Make ourselves useful and grab hot dogs and beers for them after Pat takes a dump.” Funny, I can’t understand why most of the world finds Americans to be obnoxious. Anyway, Jim popped me into the manual chair and off we went.

The nearest men’s room was big, open, and clean. Very clean for a sports stadium. Then again, almost no one went to games at this stadium, so there’s that. It was also empty, which was good, for this was an URGENT call from nature.

Now at this time in my life, I was still able to transfer myself from wheelchair to regular chair, seat or bench without assistance, as long as there wasn’t too much of a height difference. Since it was summer, I was also wearing shorts, which made it easier to undress and dress myself as well. Without waiting for any help, I rolled into the handicapped stall, slid the bolt to keep the door closed, parked my chair next to the toilet, and slid over quite rapidly. When ya gotta go….ya gotta go. I wasn’t even all the way onto the toilet when I realized I was screwed. The ADA (American’s with Disabilities Act) states that a public toilet must be 19″ from the ground, or higher. This one wasn’t even close. I realized why: Duh…I’m in Canada. The ADA is an AMERICAN law. The stall was plenty big, but they must have different (or no) requirements for height. Too late. I slid down and made it onto the toilet just fine, but before I completed my business, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to transfer back to my chair without help. No worries. Once I was done, I could get my shorts back on and have Jim come in….but, damn, I had bolted the door. The stall door, which was a good 3 feet away from where I currently sat. Might as well be the distance to the moon. I couldn’t reach it. I told Jim this, who was outside the stall, leaning against a bank of sinks. He told me he loved me, but he wasn’t crawling under the 3/4 wall that went almost to the floor in a public men’s room. Not even because it was a gross thought, but more, with our timing, some dude would walk in at that moment, think he was a pervert, and we would quickly have “an international incident.” Not good.

By now, I was done with the duke, and had cleaned myself, wiggled my shorts on and was sitting there as my legs fell asleep, wondering how I was going to do this. Jim climbing over the top wasn’t an option either as there was no way to get leverage on the side stall wall.

I removed one of the swing away wheelchair arms and tried to gain momentum through the air to use it as a long arm to slide the lock open. I didn’t have the strength to swing it high enough but it did give Jim an idea.

“Dude.” he said “There’s a pretty large, sturdy looking plastic trash can out here that’s empty. I could flip it over, stand on it and use the wheelchair arm to reach down and unlock the stall door. Can you slide the chair arm out under the stall? Toss it so it glides across the floor.”

I did. He picked it up, flipped the trash can over and as he began to step up onto it, a father came into the bathroom with his young son. I didn’t see or hear them, but Jim said to me “Pat, are you sure you can’t reach your wheelchair from where you’re sitting? Are you positive that you can’t transfer?”

“What the hell is wrong with you? I’ve been sitting in here for ten minutes while we have tried everything. NOW you ask me if I’m sure? You’re a dick.” Just then I heard *flush* and the voice of a little kid. Then I understood: Jim was trying to be obvious and point out to the dad that he wasn’t some sick bastard in the men’s room looking for God knows what. Good, Moeschen. Nice language. The father and son left and then Jim said something like “Your biggest problem is that you can’t read the room, you ass.” He was right, but in my defense, I just wanted to get off the hopper. Any longer and Joe and Mike, still watching the game, would send out a search party.

Finally, Jim climbed up on the plastic barrel, being careful to hang on to the top of the stall with one hand, while not putting his full weight on the barrel, lest it caved in. In his other hand, he had the black metal swing away wheelchair part, which was shaped like an arm bent at the elbow. He looked in, grinned at me, and then swung a couple of times attempting to unlock the sliding bolt. On the 4th or 5th try, he got it. The door immediately began to swing open, and the plastic barrel fell in along with Jim, still holding one hand on the top of the swinging stall door.

“Hello.”

“Got it man. Here we go, let me just put this barrel back. Ok, Come to papa…”

He lifted me back into the wheelchair. We both washed our hands, laughed, and went back to our seats. Two innings had gone by, and we were gone about 45 minutes. When we got back, Joe looked over and said: “You two useless morons forgot about our beers and hotdogs. We need some new friends. Where the hell were you two losers?”

The Expos beat The Mets 2-1 that night. A few seasons later, the team moved to Washington D.C. Olympic Stadium is still there. I have not been back. Funny, not funny. Ok, funny.

Stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned.